Thoughtleadership for Successful
CRM and Sales Process

Posts Tagged as‘sales process effectiveness’

At their 2010 Summit, SiriusDecisions announced an update to the Demand Creation Waterfall concept they had released back in 2005. Their VP of Research, Tony Jaros, asserted that there is too much focus on the initial lead generation stage, and not enough attention paid to the nurturing process. With this in mind, they introduced five integration areas between sales and marketing to help smooth the nurturing process.

• Seed: Focused on the top of the funnel, using traditional and social media to set the stage for demand creation.

• Create: Centered on the early stages of net new lead creation, Jaros suggested marketers should also shift their focus from quantity to quality.

• Enable: With marketing increasing their role in sales enablement, Jaros pointed out that sales will improve its flow of real opportunities and also improve their ability to source their own leads.

• Accelerate: In response to the stalled deals clogging pipelines, lead acceleration is becoming a hot topic as companies look to improve the flow of leads with targeted content and messaging.

• Nurture: Because lead nurturing is now required at different phases of the waterfall, Jaros emphasized that care and feeding of leads will remain critical to avoid prospects falling out of the waterfall.

This is a good high-level look at ways to interface sales and marketing with the demand waterfall, but let’s take a more concentrated look at a few of their points.

Traditional & Social Media:

Right off the bat we see the mention of integration of traditional and social media marketing. Let’s talk about integration - most noticeably about the integration of social media marketing with traditional sales & marketing tactics. This is not only where social media provides the most value (when working in tandem with other efforts), but also where you'll receive the highest ROI.

Quality not Quantity:

While it's simple advice for any lead generation campaign, it's worth revisiting from time to time, assessing how you're managing your resources and ensuring your team is onboard with your goals.

Detour Plan:

For leads who may have gone astray in your sales pipeline, you need to nurture them back into the fold. By identifying points where prospects can detour from your sales funnel, you can redraw the sales pipeline to fit that prospect's needs and avoid losing them altogether. A good sales tool for this is CampaignerCRM process-driven CRM and MobileCRM for the SMB market. Not only does it keep your sales team honest about making sure they execute all of the steps necessary in the sales cycle, but gives your team a roadmap tool for success.

Work Smart, not Hard:

Again, a simple thought, but one that is good to revisit. Go the extra mile in the planning phase, developing a profile for your prospects before you talk to them - it will pay off when you're actually on the phone with them. If you feel you're losing a prospect - don't rush to call them without first taking a step back to consider their needs and develop some sort of plan to reel them in again.

My typical workday consists of consulting with CEOs and Vice Presidents of Sales regarding sales process, performance and effectiveness. One of the questions I hear on a regular basis is “why is the sales process so important and why should I have one?” To help answer this question I like to use a tried and true sports analogy. In the NFL, the playbook is sacred. So why not in sales?

Now, those of you who know me know that I am a huge fan of the NFL and more specifically the Pittsburgh Steelers. Do you think that [INSERT YOUR FAVORITE TEAM HERE] would ever take the field without having a playbook? Of course not. Failure to prepare in professional sports is no different than in sales. Without a game plan, the right talent and the ability to execute, you will lose. A sales process is the equivalent of playbook. If you want to execute consistently and be in the best possible position to win a sales process is critical to your success.

Think about a rookie arriving to the NFL. What’s the first thing they receive? The playbook. They study, memorize and practice to it. A playbook is a sacred diary of trust. It encompasses years of knowledge that has been tweaked and perfected. The playbook helps the team to know what is expected and what they need to do to accomplish their goals. The playbook becomes the intellectual property of the organization behind it, the secret sauce. If you don’t have a sales process, you are leaving your sales intellectual property in the hands of a few key salespeople.

Sports teams practice for a reason. The same thing applies to professional selling. You have to know what conversations to have, how to properly qualify potential buyers, how to have more effective conversations and ensure consistent execution of your value proposition. If you don’t pay attention to these details, your competition will.

I’ll never forget a post-game interview of Coach Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers after a devastating loss to the Cincinnati Bengals. When asked why the Steelers lost the game Coach Tomlin replied “Really, what it is, and it’s the story of the National Football League, is we’ve got to get on the details. This is the ultimate parity league. When you’re on the details, you find ways to win close games, you find ways to close games simply because you’re living and performing right. When you’re not, you’re not and we accept responsibility for that.”

Understand your sales playbook and execute. While this may seem obvious to some, many sales organizations don’t place enough emphasis on it and don’t coach to it. The most successful sales organizations treat the process (aka playbook) like a sacred diary and it shows in their performance.

Treat your sales playbook with care, coach to it and you will be rewarded with results. The most successful teams, in sports and in sales, do this without a second thought.

Is your organization lacking productivity? Do you depend on your employees to be motivated and engaged in their work?

The first step to becoming a more productive office is to identify their personal productivity “peak” times throughout the day. Peak productivity times are when you are at a high mental energy output mode. Once you identify your personal mental peak times during the day, it is easy to improve productivity by planning and prioritizing. Schedule meetings starting right after lunch as productivity tends to be low (due to the lunch hangover effect). The goal here is to “manage” peak times not time it. With campaignercrm you can use action plans embedded into your sales process, or a simple task list each day pulled straight from our Mylist feature. Once you identify your high priority tasks, you can concentrate and focus your mental energy on these tasks within your set peak times throughout the day. Set specific goals to be achieved by the end of the day and work back from there. Splitting the project up in a number of separate “peak” time periods assigning each part its own deadline and goal in the campaignercrm Sales Process feature make large tasks manageable. By incrementally finishing one part at a time, a project can be successfully delivered and your confidence percentage will increase.

Along with that another important skill of a productive office is effective communication. When you are communicating with staff and clients make sure that all your instructions and information are understood. Setting up a campaignercrm IO channel gives you and your client that one on one portal to share and exchange documents and comments so that it is clear right from the start. Updating your Interactive Notes helps your office staff see where you are and what has been done with that client. Keep a yearly planner that you record projects (annual/monthly/etc) so that you can see at a glance when you need to start collecting information or when something should be complete by using our Pulse.

Many organizations don't understand how to improve productivity of their employees. They are under constant pressure to increase productivity, profitability and revenue growth and it often overshadows the importance of how an unengaged workforce can negatively affect corporate performance. With campaignercrm's software, every tool you need to keep ahead of the competition is there for them.